29. Chapter 29
“Can you not get into drama for five freaking minutes?” Ben grabbed me around the waist and hauled me off the cauldron.
“Yeah, yeah, help me empty this!” I hissed and seized the edge of the cauldron.
“What?”
“Just do it!”
Still rolling his eyes, Ben jogged around the other side, and together we heaved the cauldron onto its side. The potion gushed across the floor and the egg rolled out, thumping on the floorboards.
“Throw me that.” I gestured to a bundle of tea towels on the table next to the cauldron, and Ben threw me the whole thing. I wrapped the egg up in several, careful not to get any potion on my hands, just in case. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Are you going to explain what’s going on?” Ben asked, jogging to catch up with me as I headed for the back door.
“In a minute, let’s go!”
I used the fresh adrenaline pumping through my veins to spur me into a run as we burst outside and back toward the fence. I hadn’t been this certain in some time that we were going to fix everything.
***
Everything fell into place in my head as we ran between the trees back toward the portal. Nobody had found the egg after Isadora made her potion, and only the testimonies of Allison, Ben, and I had secured the version of events that had led to their imprisonment. Chief Mallory, perhaps in desperation after one of my interviews, had told me she wished to find the egg to see if returning it to the phoenix would make any difference. In my mind, that would only have made the situation much worse.
But if nobody had found the egg... perhaps it was because we had taken it.
“Time to explain, please,” Ben said. “Should I be worried?”
“Completely the opposite,” I replied, jumping off a large root on my merry skip through the woods. “The ship was the key the whole time.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ugh! Ben!” I whirled around and started jogging backward just so he could see me rolling my eyes. “When we go through a portal to the ship, everything returns to its original state. The pirate with the broken nose and me after you gave me good luck; why shouldn’t the same thing happen with the egg?”
“That is... holy crap that actually might just work.” Ben’s eyes widened, and he nearly tripped over a tree branch. “Do you think... will it?”
“I don’t know, but out of everything we’ve tried...” We had tried everything else, and this bypassed changing the important event itself, not that the universe or whatever would even let me.
“Okay, that’s fine,” Ben said. “But what do we do about the Captain?”
In all the excitement, I had forgotten about him.
“Between now and when we got onto the ship, we heard nothing about him,” I said. “So maybe if we leave him here... he keeps a low profile? Maybe we can find him when we get back and deal with him, then?”
It was the only solution I could think of. Our main priority was to get the egg onto the ship, captain or no captain. We had to deal with our problems one at a time.
“You don’t think he’d do something stupid?” Ben asked.
“I think he’s just smart enough to know not to go charging into a time he knows nothing about without exercising some caution,” I said. “Even if he lost the mind games against his mermaid-witch, he still has to have a brain cell or two between his ears.”
“But do those two brain cells stand a chance against his need for revenge?”
I pursed my lips. Both of us knew how powerful the need for revenge could be. It had defined our lives until we unknowingly hooked up. Actually, this whole situation had come about from generations of vengeful relatives on both sides. It wasn’t a force to take lightly.
When we reached the place where the portal had spat us out, at a particularly gnarly tree, I jerked my chin down at my chest.
“Could you get the amulet, please? My hands are full,” I said.
But as Ben looped the amulet from around my neck, a familiar sound of metal ripping across leather had me flinching. The Captain’s blade struck the trunk of the gnarled tree, and he stepped out of the shadows.
“I see your business has you dealing with more magic,” the Captain said, gesturing to the egg with his sword. “You’re foolish to steal an egg from a phoenix. It’ll curse you worse than Kendra ever could.”
“Yeah, we actually know,” I said.
Ben looked at me, the smile in the corner of his mouth making me suspicious. He tossed the amulet up into the air and caught it.
“So, are you ready to come back with us?” Ben asked.
“Is it that simple?” the Captain asked, still approaching us with his sword ahead of him. “I suspected you would be more inclined to leave me here.”
“We’re not interested in letting you roam around our time,” Ben said. “All we asked was that you let us do what we needed to do before we held up our end of the bargain. Now we’re done. We can send you back to yours.”
“Ben,” I hissed.
What was he thinking? With a ‘love’ potion in hand and a laundry list of bad intentions, how could we let this guy go off into his own time?
“Didn’t you two make an agreement?” Ben asked. “You get to go where you want to go and we get to go home. What do you say?”
The Captain sheathed his weapon and stepped up to the tree where the tiny dot marking the portal magic lay against the tree’s bark. “And here I thought you were going to be all unreasonable.”
“We could make a big mistake here,” I whispered to Ben as we made our way over.
“You agreed to this,” Ben muttered back. “We don’t have any choice.”
I clutched the phoenix egg tighter as we surrounded the tree, and I rejigged it in my arms to free up a hand and beckoned for Ben to give me the amulet.
“If you do anything other than walk through your portal, I’ll send you through it myself with your own sword through your heart,” I warned the Captain as Ben handed me the amulet.
The Captain smiled a wry grin. “Not a man alive has managed it, wench. I have faith no woman could.”
“A woman sealed you in your ship,” I said. “Sounds to me like they could do a lot worse.”
He leaned in toward me just a fraction, a gold tooth glinting in the sunlight. “And when I have finished with her, the punishment she bestowed on me will not seem so severe.”
Well, that didn’t help my concerns one bit. But we had to weigh it all up, and on balance, getting this egg to safety had to take priority.
With an uneasy feeling still rolling around in my gut, I held up the amulet to the tree, and we were jerked toward it in a flash of light.
I stumbled out the other side, holding the egg to me so tightly that it made my tummy ache. It took a few blinks for my eyes to see again, and I could only make out the moving silhouettes of Ben and the Captain for the first few moments. But even as a shadow, I could see the Captain putting a hand on the hilt of his cutlass.